Creative Independence in the Spotlight: Kickstarter Creators at SXSW
Greetings from Austin, TX! Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be catching up with creators at South by Southwest, where they’re doing everything from debuting films to filling gig venues to showcasing inventive innovations — all in front of eager crowds seeking a peek at the future of design, technology, and culture at large.
Over the course of the festival, we’ll be chatting with creators about the creative journey—all the way from project launch to launching into the spotlight at SXSW—and we’ll be sharing their experiences and insights right here. Check back for updates!
Naked | Tameca Jones
Musician and lifelong Austin resident Tameca Jones had years of experience as a performing artist under her belt, but she knew she had to make a record to take her career to the next level. Being a recording artist, she says, is “a different beast entirely.”
Naked was the result of that effort. “You need a solid product to get out there,” Jones says, and at South By she’s hoping to use her album to build up her network and connect with fans. Like some Austinites, Jones is used to seeing the festival take over her city. “I’ve avoided SXSW for years because it seems like a big hassle — parking, people,” she says, but it’s also a place to make things happen: “You just have to plan, and make sure you plan early, and build that squad early, and have a team. Otherwise you’re just going to be another band playing a showcase at a bar.”
For Jones, maintaining real ownership over what she was making was incredibly important. “Creative independence gives you the freedom to express yourself and your personality” she says.
Remidi | Andrea Baldereschi
Making creativity easier was what Remidi co-founder Andrea Baldereschi had in mind when he started developing his project—the first wearable instrument. “The whole story of Remidi: I had this idea of creating a tool to make music, just because I never had the time to learn to play a traditional instrument. I don’t know how easy it would have been to validate the market with our idea: here’s where creative independence comes in. We had a thing in mind, we started doing it, we started putting it together, and then we got to a platform where we could actually see if people liked it, without having to go through all of the steps that would have been normal if Kickstarter didn’t exist.”
Collaboration was crucial to the process. Baldereschi first came to Austin by way of an internship at Livid, another music hardware startup. Thanks to what he learned and the relationships he built there, Baldereschi is now back in Austin full time, where’s he’s working with co-founder Mark Demay on Remidi in the Austin outpost of the Techstars accelerator.
The ongoing collaboration with Livid is very important to the team. “We have a human connection because we spend a lot of time together, and on the other side we have very similar markets but we have a different approach to the products,” Baldereschi says. “Livid is one of the best products in the world for the sort of ‘classical’ hardware generators. We’re trying to be the next generation.”
For the Remidi team, SXSW is a big deal: “It’s a huge opportunity for us, so we’re spending a lot of time working on it, because we want to get the best during these days, because Austin during South By is like the center of the world,” Baldereschi says.
Cubetto | Filippo Yacob
Filippo Yacob, CEO of Primo Toys, is at SXSW to meet up with others in the design and tech community, and to share the latest news about Cubetto, Primo’s hands-on programming toy for kids. Enthusiasm from the community was integral to the Cubetto design process, Yacob says. “We had a hunch that this was a good idea, that we were doing something good, but Kickstarter was a way of showing it. It was either years of research, development, market testing — and we did have some big companies that were interested in working with us — or just going straight to the user.”
Working with many backers had a big impact on the project, Yacob says. “It was really interesting that all of a sudden it wasn’t just two people developing something. It was 600-plus people developing something.” This changed everything. “Whatever preconceived notion we had of how a project should have been, of how it should have been delivered, just went out the window.”
Thanks to community feedback, the team has just launched a new campaign for a second iteration of the Cubetto: “Now what we’re making is basically the Cubetto 2.0, with all the functionalities and expansion capabilities that we should have put in the first product,” Yacob says.
Trapped | Dawn Porter
Dawn Porter’s Trapped investigates the legal restrictions that states are imposing on abortion providers (known as TRAP laws, or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers), limiting women’s ability to access safe and legal termination of their pregnancies. After receiving a Special Jury Award at last month’s Sundance Film Festival, Porter felt that bringing the film to Texas, one of the states most affected by TRAP laws, was very important. “South By being located in Austin was really a dream location for us,” Porter says.“Texas is the only audience where no one says, ‘What’s a TRAP law?’”
This is Porter’s first visit to South By: “It’s a prestigious festival, and you’re fighting for slots, and we fought hard to be there. It was a super important audience for us,” she says.
Porter says that SXSW lived up to its reputation — “except the traffic was fine!” And she says she appreciates being part of the South By film community: “You know, there’s a sense of creative spirit there in the way that people talk about film. There’s a real love of craft and of community there that really kind of envelops you. Every festival has its own personality. SXSW is fun, it’s celebratory, it [has] really knowledgeable audiences, [it’s full of] people who love spending a whole day going to films.”
My Beautiful Broken Brain | Sophie Robinson and Lotje Sodderland
My Beautiful Broken Brain is a documentary film that tells the story of filmmaker Lotje Sodderland’s recovery from a catastrophic brain hemorrhage that she sustained at age 34. Because the documentary was made in concurrence with her recovery, the filmmaking process had to be carefully molded to be mindful of what Sodderland could manage. “I met Lotje a week after she had her stroke,” says co-director Sophie Robinson. “We learned quite quickly that by going down the traditional funding route, we were suddenly going to be faced with deadlines and editorial demands from other people which [Sodderland] would not have been able to cope with, emotionally or cognitively.”
The filmmakers started thinking that it would make more sense, and be more fun, to make the film themselves. They decided to go ahead with “making a film that we were both happy with editorially and creatively, and then taking it to distributors and broadcasters,” Robinson says.
“South By is brilliant because you’ve got all of these people coming together in one place—it’s not just filmmakers or just broadcasters, you’ve got the music world there, but there’s also the online, digital, and tech worlds as well, which we’re working in a lot,” Robinson says. “So for me, it’s perfect. It feels like it’s looking at the future a bit more—not just old-fashioned, sentimental ways of filmmaking.”
Ovarian Psycos | Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle
The Ovarian Psycos bicycle brigade comprises an irreverent and unapologetic group of women of color based in East Los Angeles. The Psycos are committed to confronting racism and violence, and to creating safe spaces for women. Filmmakers Kate Trumbull-LaValle and Joanna Sokolowski’s eponymous documentary about the Psycos marks the pair’s SXSW debut.
“We’re both first-time feature filmmakers, and it’s been a really incredible experience getting into such a prestigious festival,” Sokolowski says. “We’re so close to being able to share the film with an audience — with our audience.”
Trumbull-LaValle adds, “When we started this film, we dreamed about what it could be, where it could premiere. We both said that South By would be a great place for this film because it’s young, it’s about women of color, it’s about feminism. [Our film] is a very current, urban story, and South By has a reputation of premiering films that feature edgy, political storytelling. For us as emerging women filmmakers, this is just great!”
Sokolowski and Trumbull-LaValle ran two Kickstarter campaigns: one to produce the film, and one to bring the team to South By for the premiere, including the three women who are the feature’s real-life protagonists.
“When people contribute to your project, they just kind of sign on and trust you, they really take a leap of faith that you’ll finish the project, that you’ll deliver the rewards, that you’ll do a good job,” Trumbull-LaValle says. “And so we felt a sense of obligation to do the best job that we could.” Finishing a campaign and knowing that hundreds of people were committed to the project helped to propel them forward. “Creative independence is something that we’ve had all along,” she says, “but when you have folks who contributed cold, hard cash, that also comes with a sense of responsibility that you do your best work.”
Slash | Clay Liford
Clay Liford is debuting Slash, his teen comedy about erotic fan fiction, at SXSW. Liford had a lot of people to please when he set out to make the film, as the slash fiction community is very vocal and engaged. “They really care about what they do,” he says. Tumblr blew up with conversations about the film, which helped Liford and his team understand the movie’s audience and engage in a positive, constructive dialogue with them. When it came to launching their Kickstarter campaign, Liford says, “We got some kickback,” but by communicating with backers clearly and frequently, “we were able to show our true colors to the fan community, which was always what we wanted: to play fair.”
Maintaining creative independence is important to Liford because large studios tend to be risk-averse. “I don’t think I’m making really avant-garde films,” he says, “but I do think I’m making stuff that would be very difficult to get made through the studio system.”
“South By has probably been the strongest force in my career,” he says. “ My last two features premiered there. It launched me as a feature film director. I had two features in a row, and now this is my third. I owe them a lot.”
Donald Cried | Kris Avedisian
Making Donald Cried has been a years-long labor of love for director Kris Avedisian and his collaborators, Kyle Espeleta and Jesse Wakeman. After completing a short version of the film in 2012, they’re now premiering a feature-length version at SXSW.
Avedisian says of SXSW: “I’ve always liked their lineups and the culture there. It just always seemed like the place that we’d wanna go, that was the perfect place for this movie and the kind of audience that would be there.” The audience that Avedisian wants is “a little bit of a movie nerd, people into cult classic type stuff,” Avedisian says. “But I also think Donald Cried has the potential to hit a broader audience.”
Getting the creative pace right was crucial to the filmmaking process. “We’ve known each other forever,” Avedisian says of the team. “I was writing the script and looking for a producer at the same time.” The process took somewhat longer than initially anticipated, but that wasn’t a bad thing, he says: “That was a blessing, because I think the story got better and better the more time we had to spend with it, just plugging away, and not being hasty or doing something because we wanted to do it, but waiting for everything to feel right.”
For more dispatches from SXSW, follow #KickstarterSXSW.
